E75 Highway

Skanska is a major owner of the Nelostie special purpose company that delivered and has operated the 69km dual lane motorway between Järvenpää, a city north of Helsinki, and Lahti in Finland.

By making travel in and out of the city faster and safer, the highway has brought economic regeneration by attracting families and businesses to move to the five communities along the route. Running alongside a new railway, the road is helping to create a dynamic growth corridor.

The new road, consisting of the second carriageway, was built on the eastern side of the old motorway and relies on more complex construction than can be seen in the actual highway structures. In areas where the ground is soft, a concrete slab was built on top of reinforced concrete pilings, acting as an underground bridge supporting the road’s other layers of construction. In addition to these hidden bridges, a total of 88 new overground bridges were built along the 69-kilometre route.

As the first major PFI/PPP road project in the Nordic countries, the motorway uses a shadow toll payment system. This means that the owner of the highway, the Skanska ID-led special purpose company Tieyhtiö Nelostie Oy, is paid by the authorities depending partly on user numbers.

The PPP approach brought forward the implementation of the project by 5-6 years and includes operation and maintenance until 2012 as well as design and construction, which was completed almost a year ahead of schedule. It has changed the way that the Finnish Road Authority (Finnra) procures highways.

Linkit

Yhteiskunnalliset näkökulmat

The motorway supports 20,000 - 25,000 vehicles a day, up from 13,000 before it opened. The journey time has fallen from an hour and a half to less than an hour and the road has a great safety record.

Enables commuters to achieve better quality of life.

Fosters economic development in the whole region.

Delivery 1 year earlier compared to contract.

Year-round maintenance keeps the road open in all weather.

The motorway will save society an estimated €20 - 30m in time and reduced accidents.

Young families and new businesses are settling along the route, attracted by a higher standard of living within easy travelling distance of Helsinki.

Road art at each exit of the five communities the motorway passes identifies the communities and makes the journey more enjoyable.

Taloudelliset näkökulmat

The benefit to the communities of rapid construction is estimated to be around €100m (by allowing earlier use of the road).

Ympäristönäkökulmat

Lahti acts as a gateway to Finland’s lake region, which hosts second homes and summer cottages in an area of outstanding natural beauty. The road has environmentally focused landscaping features reduce the impact of noise, headlights and traffic along the route. The environmental support program planted 175,000 trees and bushes along the highway to help it blend into the surrounding area, and mature trees have been planted along the central reservation to reduce glare from oncoming headlights.

With such a major traffic corridor, noise could also be a problem, and the Skanska design and construction team adopted a novel approach to overcome this. By recycling half of the country’s worn out tyres and embedding them in the walls of the highway at key points along its route, the team has created a built-in noise reduction system that protects the stillness of the nearby forest.